A top ten list for Democratic renewal

Part VII of the series: Why is the Democratic party in trouble?

For the past two weeks we’ve taken a stab at answering the question: Why is the Democratic party in trouble? And it is in trouble — having been swept in the last election and primed for more losing going forward, absent a change in direction.

Yet the party has been oddly complacent in the face of its predicament, with an establishment that has refused to budge, sticking with carbon copy leadership cadres in Congress and presidential candidates cut out of nearly identical cloth. In the final post of the series we explore what the party needs to do to turn things around.

But first, here’s the full series outline with links to the previous posts:

WHY IS THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY IN TROUBLE?

I. A brief review of party history up to 1964 

II. The Democrats from 1964 to the new century 

III. The aughts were a hopeful time, but problems lurked under the surface  

IV. An electoral deadlock develops between the parties, to the Democrats’ disadvantage  

V. The Democrats in 2024: A case study of party dysfunction  

VI. The party establishment has its head in the sand  

VII. A top ten list for Democratic renewal

The path forward for the party is far from clear, but the goal should be obvious: achieve a stable, long lasting majority. This is an ambitious objective but it is the only one that makes sense. It requires a kind of quantum leap in political strategizing, what Adam Jentleson described as “supermajority thinking.”

A stable governing majority: it’s happened before
For much of American history one party or the other has secured a stable majority. It was the Republicans in the first few decades of the 20th century up until the political earthquake triggered by the Great Depression. The Democrats capitalized and were the majority party in the country from the early 1930s all the way until 1994, winning congressional majorities almost every time even as the White House slipped out of reach. The so-called New Deal coalition was unwieldy, but it was a winner.

That coalition evaporated in 1994 and hasn’t been effectively replaced by either side. Since that time (see part IV of the series) the country has experienced the longest period of electoral stasis in history, with neither party able to sustain regular success at the congressional or presidential levels. And the public has been split almost down the middle.

What does it take? An unwieldy coalition is a winning coalition
The U.S. is an incredibly diverse country ethnically, regionally, and ideologically. Because of that, it is impossible to secure a long-term hold on politics without a coalition comprised of strange bedfellows.¹

Ralph Waldo Emerson once famously observed that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” For our purposes we can reformulate that, a little less pithily, as: “ideological consistency is the enemy of electoral success in a two-party system.”

In part I of this series we saw that the New Deal coalition was so diverse as to beggar belief. Southern conservatives — most of them segregationists into the 1960s — joined with urban ethnics, labor, liberals, and western populists. The coalition was at its strongest politically in the first 30 years by keeping civil rights on the back burner. But even when that became untenable after presidents Kennedy and Johnson broke the back of legal segregation, other implicit agreements among the various coalitional components kept the party in a dominant position in Congress.

When you boil it all down, the lesson from the New Deal coalition wasn’t that it guaranteed electoral success — Eisenhower took the presidency twice in the 1950s and Republicans won the office most of the time from 1968 until Clinton — but it gives you a chance. And the coalition did dominate congressional politics for an incredibly long stretch — from 1932 all the way into the 1990s.

Today’s Republicans may have the right idea
Today’s Republican coalition is both unwieldy and fraught with internal contradictions — and it’s doing pretty well. Granted they’ve been roughly even-steven with Democrats in electoral politics, but their prospects are clearly better than their rival’s going forward. Not only did they win almost 3% more of the popular vote in the US House races in 2024, their coalition is better primed for growth. And it is in large part because it’s unwieldy.

The main components of the GOP coalition are

a) pro-business conservatives who favor deregulatory policy,

b) libertarians who prioritize lower taxes,

c) Christian conservatives who push for abortion restrictions and other culturally conservative policies, and

d) populists who like Trump’s hard line on immigration and trade.

What you have in the party is a form of logrolling where business types are happy enough with deregulatory policy that they don’t push back too hard on immigration and trade where their positions diverge sharply from the populists’. Similarly, libertarians get enough from the small government rhetoric and lower taxes that they don’t quarrel with the social conservative positions they disagree with. Meanwhile social conservatives, who get their federal judges, and populists, who get their immigration and trade planks, aren’t inclined to make waves over deregulation and tax cuts.

In short, it’s all working pretty well, even though it is far from pretty.

One generally overlooked tack the party took involved their 2024 party platform. For one thing, it doesn’t say too much, especially when compared to the Democrats’ litany of specific progressive stances on every imaginable issue. Oh, and the GOP platform comes in under 30 pages (with lots of pictures!), while the Democrats’ is over 90.

The Republican platform veers from the platitudinous (“unite our country to bring it to new record levels of success”) to specific populist positions (“carry out the largest deportation operation in American history”) to specific liberal ones (“protect Social Security and Medicare with no cuts [and] no changes to the retirement age”) to who could be against this? planks (“large tax cuts for workers”). This mishmash may have enabled the party to tap into votes from solid Democratic constituencies, especially Latinos and to a lesser extent blacks.

Is the Republican coalition manageable? Certainly not on a regular basis with the minute majorities they have achieved — just ask Kevin McCarthy. But is there potential to grow a larger majority? It does appear so. And it did deliver unified government in the 2024 election.

The Democrats have a problem
The New Deal coalition officially fell apart in 1994 when the Newt Gingrich-led Republicans recruited stronger candidates to run in traditionally Democratic areas that had trended GOP at the presidential level. These candidates persuaded voters that the Democrats had pursued a culturally liberal agenda that didn’t fit their preferences. It was true: Democrats had become a litmus test party, inimical to pro-lifers and social conservatives in general.

And things have only gotten worse over time — witness the litany of progressive policy positions on gender politics, the environment, indigenous people, guns, and so forth in the 2024 party platform.

The fundamental problem is this: specifying policy positions — virtually all progressive — on every imaginable issue works against majority building and thus is a sure loser. After all, the first priority of political parties is to win elections.²

What can be done? — let’s get specific
First, let’s look to an unorthodox source for advice: Julie Andrews. In The Sound of Music her plan was to “start at the very beginning, a very good place to start.”

For a political party, that beginning entails articulating your reason for existence. Here’s a practical syllogism that points Democrats in the right direction:

1. Everything in politics — from achieving policy objectives to gaining a stable majority — flows from winning.

2. You can’t win with an ideological litmus test platform

3. Thus, the best approach to a party platform is K.I.S.S. — keep it simple, stupid.

That means a statement of purpose that is easy to wrap your mind around and that everyone associated with the party can get on board with, even if it doesn’t fully satisfy everyone (see GOP platform above).

What does that mean in practice? — maybe try actually being liberal
For Democrats the answer is surprisingly obvious: The party believes government has a role in promoting opportunity for all its citizens.

That’s it, full stop.

This approach would be in keeping with the essence of what the party was about in the New Deal era. At that time FDR believed government had to act to bring the country out of the Depression. He operationalized it this way during a 1932 campaign in an address at Oglethorpe University: “The country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another.”

Today Democrats must find a way to persuade people that government can be a force for good in removing barriers to opportunity. And, ironically, the party of liberals needs to re-capture what it means to be liberal in the adjectival sense of the word — “willing to respect or accept behavior or opinions different from one's own; open to new ideas” — instead of in the current sense of the word as noun: “a person who espouses progressive policies and ideas.”

That simple philosophical shift would give the party a better chance at winning in the short term, and might even put them on the road to a stable majority. The key thing to grasp is: Having a stable majority doesn’t make it easy to govern; it does make it possible to govern. Which is really the best you can hope for in a diverse democracy.

The top ten list for Democratic renewal
Democrats, to be blunt, need to change their ways. To wit:

1. Don’t marginalize your majority makers. Both parties are guilty of working like crazy during the election campaign to win the three dozen or so competitive House seats, as well as any close Senate races. These seats are disproportionately won by candidates who don’t fit neatly the conservative or liberal label. But after all the effort the winners are often marginalized or even ostracized by their colleagues while in office. The only way to get past the 30 year electoral deadlock is to celebrate your majority makers and expand the playing field of majority maker districts and competitive Senate seats.

2. Embrace the ideological diversity of your coalition. Democrats have focused on the ethnic diversity of their coalition, while at the same time traveling a million miles from ideological diversity. The mantra should be: No Ideological Diversity, No Majority.

3. Get away from litmus tests. The party needs to keep the focus on the objective of promoting what good government can do for all its citizens. The laundry list-style platform often gets in the way of that objective.

4. Get away from quotas. Diversity screening for congressional leadership, federal nominations, roles in the national party, and for anything else muddies the waters. The unstated quota system, to put it simply, excludes people, which is decidedly not what the party should be about. Instead, the party needs to embrace opportunity for advancement to all who want to be a part of its mission.

5. Take on sacred cows. If catering to special interests associated with the party conflicts with the party’s objectives — which for Democrats should be using government to expand opportunity for all its citizens — then take on that interest. For example, don’t reflexively back the teachers unions when their objectives fly in the face of improving educational opportunities; don’t back everything federal employee unions want if the public has no faith in government; don’t support the entire climate change agenda if it is evident communities’ livelihoods are at stake; and so on.

6. Recognize that all policy choices have trade-offs. If you approach public policy with the mature understanding that there is no perfect solution to any given problem, that every approach has its pluses and minuses, then you are on the road to the flexibility with which FDR approached the New Deal. If one policy doesn’t work, scrap it and try another.

7. Don’t be afraid to be bold. Democrats have become averse to change, something which should be anathema to a truly liberal (see above) party. Consider what President Clinton did in 1996 — he signed legislation that for the only time in our history ended a major entitlement program (Aid to Families with Dependent Children, colloquially known as “welfare”). He worked with Republicans in Congress on that, and by implementing a work requirement helped promote trust in government, an absolute necessity if your objective is to sell the idea that government is a good thing.

8. Focus on citizens. Our one sentence core Democratic objective advocates expanding opportunity for citizens. This doesn’t preclude opportunities for legal residents (and concern for those here illegally), but there are priorities and making them clear is the right approach.

9. Acknowledge that America is not Europe. We have a distinct political culture, one that never has been and will likely never be conducive to Rawlsian outcome-based processes. Those may fit elsewhere, but here, like it or not, the market is substantially free. That does not mean government doesn’t have a role as a countervailing force; in fact, the point of the Democratic party should be to make the case that it does. But fantasies of a Scandinavian style welfare state are just that, fantasies. The path to growing a stable majority includes acknowledging that reality.

10. Listen to Keir Starmer and don’t lecture voters. As described in part VI of this series, Democrats insisted for months leading up to the 2024 election that people just didn’t understand that the economy was strong and that Biden was on top of things. The strategy that followed from that was to repeatedly remind voters how great things actually were. Alas, unfortunately many didn’t see it that way. So … what to do now that it’s become evident that lecturing voters doesn’t work? We wrap up the series by bringing back Keir Starmer’s approach to digging out of a political hole — no less important for being obvious: “When you lose that badly you don’t look to voters and say, ‘What on earth were you thinking?’ You look at your party and say, ‘We have to change’ … We gave up being a party of protest five years ago. We want to be a party of power.”

1. The expression “strange bedfellows” originated with Shakespeare in The Tempest, but in a political context it goes back at least as far as 1899 and cartoonist Louis Dalrymple.

2. As political theorist E.E. Schattschneider wrote: The purpose of parties is “nominating candidates and electing them to office; the object is to get power by winning elections.”